Libyan Civil War NATO orchestrated - Gaddafi executed by mob

[TonyGosling]

Shukri Ghanem, Former Libya Oil Chief, Found Dead In Danube River

By GEORGE JAHN 04/29/12 04:22 PM ET

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/29/shukri-ghanem-dead-danube-riv er_n_1463018.html

VIENNA — Shukri Ghanem, a former Libyan prime minister and oil minister who last year announced he was abandoning Moammar Gadhafi's regime to support the rebels who ultimately toppled him, was found dead Sunday in a section of the Danube river flowing through Vienna, Austrian police said.

[outsider]

I can't find a thread for Ivory Coast/Cote D'Ivoire, but it obviously has relevance to what happened in Libya.

While still a Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney received a phone call from Alassane Ouattara, requesting her backing in his bid to become President of Ivory Coast. He phoned from Kissingers yacht:

'Speaking of Henry Kissinger, let me just say this about him and his minions: When I was in the Congress, I received a phone call from Alassane Ouattara from aboard Henry Kissinger's yacht. I had received many such calls from people wanting to benefit from my good reputation within the human rights and peace community in the United States and they wanted me to sell their particular potion of iniquity to people inside the United States and to the world. Usually, these people were the kind of people accustomed to buying the consciences of public persons, so my "no" resounded rather sharply to them, and I earned yet another set of crosshairs on my forehead, I guess.'

http://blackagendareport.com/content/president-obama-gets-his-groove-b ack-attacking-africans
'Alassane Ouattara and his Zionist wife, Dominique, were seeking my assistance--or maybe my silence--in his effort to become President of Ivory Coast. I applaud Laurent Gbagbo in his efforts to stave off imperialism in Ivory Coast, one of the few African countries that has not one iota of a relationship with the U.S. military. However, Democracy Now, FOX, CNN, AP, Reuters, and all the rest didn't tell you that when they ran their many stories about Ivory Coast. While the world will celebrate "democracy" arriving in Ivory Coast once Gbagbo is gone, the exact opposite will actually be the case. Handing Ivory Coast over to Henry Kissinger and his ilk is the policy of the Obama Administration. I guess, President Obama is proving his worth: perhaps no one could have done it better.'

She has just sent out a short video on her newsletter; as you may know, the West intervened in Ivory Coast to remove Gbagbo and replace him with Ouattara: this video gives an idea of the result. It is in French, but as Cynthia says, anyone can get the message:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nazz4j8zp5E

[Disco_Destroyer]

Let the contracts roll

http://www.totaljobs.com/JobSearch/JobDetails.aspx?NoExpire=1&JobId=53 883393

[Disco_Destroyer]

interesting so far 15 mins in

The illuminati Exposed By Muammar Gaddafi


Link

[Disco_Destroyer]

Video: US consulate in Benghazi on fire, ambassador to Libya reported killed


Link

[TonyGosling]

Another evil NATO Israeli PsyOp provocation does its job
I'm not even going to look at the trailer to this film but...
Libyan Civil War NATO orchestrated - US Ambassador executed by mob
http://www.blacklistednews.com/VIDEO%3A_Anti-Islam_Movie_%E2%80%98Inno cence_of_Muslims%E2%80%99_Sparks_Attack_That_Kills_US_Ambassador_In_Li bya/21454/0/0/0/Y/M.html
There’s little doubt that the film is blasphemous so far as Muslims are concerned and will likely be offensive to almost all non-Muslims too.

[Disco_Destroyer]

and on it goes

U.S. Marines Headed To Libya


Link

[outsider]

Cynthia McKinney sent this round by email, re the killing of US Ambassador to Libya:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/libyas-green-resistance-did-it-and-nato-p owers-are-covering-up/

CLAIMS, COUNTER-CLAIMS AND DISINFORMATION

The Obama regime says “protesters” irate over an anti-Islam video did it.

The NATO-installed bureaucrats in Libya say that “foreign extremists” did it.

US Congressmen say “Al Qaeda did it”. So does CNN, as well as the alternative media web site Prison Planet, which denounces any reference to the Green Resistance as “absurd”. (1)

Media outlets, such as the UK Guardian, say “an organized terror network did it”.

Turkey’s government says “Syria’s Assad did it”.

Israel says “Hezbollah did it”.

The Sunni monarchs of the Gulf Cooperation Council oil sheikdoms say “Iran did it”.

Even reputable alternative media writers and progressive bloggers have attributed the attack to “the Benghazi Islamists”, and that this is “blowback from imperialism”.

Wikileaks says the attack happened because the US had backed Britain’s threat to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London and remove Julian Assange. (2)

Some media outlets claim that “Al Qaeda” carried out the attack in revenge for the supposed death in Pakistan (by US drone strike on 4 June 2012) of Libyan-born Abu Yahya Al Libi (aka Hassan Mohammed Qaid) who was supposedly a key aide to Osama bin Laden, and was supposedly the “number two man” in Al Qaeda.

This claim is nonsense, since Al Qaeda has been a group of mercenaries employed by Washington and London since 1980. President Reagan called them “heroes” and “freedom fighters”. The US and Britain sends its Al Qaeda mercenaries to the Balkans, Libya, Syria, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, and other places that NATO wants to infiltrate, destroy or destabilize

[Disco_Destroyer]

?? hmm
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=523627624333151

[Disco_Destroyer]

[TonyGosling]

President Obama Must Release The Truth About Benghazi
Tuesday, October 30, 2012 at 5:19PM
http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2012/10/30/president-obama-must-re lease-the-truth-about-benghazi.html

Contributed by Chriss Street. Specialist in corporate reorganizations and turnarounds, former Chairman of two NYSE listed companies. His latest book, The Third Way, describes how to achieve management excellence and financial reward by moving organizations from Conflict and Confrontation to Leadership and Cooperation. Chriss lives in Newport Beach, CA.

We have continuously warned that that the United States’ use of the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel weapons and logistics to jihadi warriors in support of Arab Spring rebellions would lead to a vicious blow-back against the strategic interests of the United States. Clearly that has come to pass with the murder of the first American Ambassador since 1979 and the ejection of American influence across the Middle East. But as Benghazi cover-up continues to unwind, the U.S. is headed for a Constitutional crisis that will have a deep and lasting impact on our nation. President Obama must immediately release the truth about Benghazi for the good of the nation.

In 2011, the United States overseas weapons sales tripled to $66.3 billion, accounting for approximately three quarters of all the foreign weapons sales in the world. Over half of the American sales, $33.4 billion worth of weapons, went to Saudi Arabia. Another $6 billion went to the Persian Gulf nations of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman.

According e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence hacked by WikiLeaks, Chief Executive Jamie Smith of “security” firm SCG International stated his organization had been contracted to U.S. intelligence agencies to supply arms to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and was now working with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to provide weapons to hard-liner Islamic jihadists brigades to overthrow Assad in Syria. Smith stated that SCG was also working to recover missing Libyan surface-to-air missiles from Benghazi, Libya.

In March of 2011, Chris Stevens was appointed by Secretary of State Clinton as the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Shortly thereafter, a non-fly-zone was declared by the U.S. and Stevens moved into Benghazi, Libya. When Libya was liberated in September, Stevens moved to Tripoli as the U.S. Ambassador.

Libya was ruled by a National Transitional Council until elections were held on July 7, 2012. LIFG formed the al-Umma al-Wasat political party under Sami al-Saadi, who had sent so many warriors to fight in Afghanistan that Taliban leader Mullah Omar called him the “Sheikh of the Arabs”. There was increasing violence leading up to the election. On June 6th an IED blew a hole in the security wall at the Benghazi Consulate “big enough for 40 men to go through”; on June 10th, the British ambassador’s car was attacked in Tripoli; and in late June, the International Red Cross in Benghazi was attacked. After the British and Red Cross withdrew, the U.S. flag over the American Consulate was the last international target in Benghazi. But the environment became much more dangerous when al-Uma al-Wasat only came in third place in the elections.

LIFG had been making great money selling Gaddafi's estimated stock of about 20,000 portable SA-7 heat-seeking missiles to the Syrian rebels, who used them to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets. Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship named 'The Intisaar' had berthed at the Turkish port of Iskenderun with docking "papers stamped by the port authority by the ship's captain, Omar Mousaeeb" of Benghazi. The ship reportedly carried 400 tons of weapons for Syrian rebels, including SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. The Times stated that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood movement and Free Army claimed the cargo for themselves, which "delayed the arrival of the weapons in Syria."

Ambassador Stevens had not visited Benghazi since his large security team was pulled from Libya in August. His visit to meet a Turkish diplomat in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11/2001 had to be connected to gun-running into Turkey to arm the Syrian rebels. He probably met with Consul Ali Sait Akin, who was the Turkish deputy representative to UNCTAD in 2003, and later a trade expert and "Head of Department" Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were no disturbances when Stevens walked the Turkish diplomat to his compound gate at 8:30 PM.

Around nightfall according to a witness on the ground, 150 bearded gunmen with some wearing the Afghan-style tunics favored by Islamic militants sealed off the streets leading to the U.S. Consulate with pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns. The trucks bore the logo of Ansar al-Shariah, a powerful local group of Islamist militants who worked with the municipal government to manage Benghazi security.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a six-man team at the CIA annex located 1.2 miles from the Consulate that were twice told to "stand down" from rushing to the Consulate after gunfire stated at 9:40 PM. According to leaked e-mails to the White House and the entire U.S. intelligence network at 10:05 PM learned the Consulate was under attack from automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and heavy machine guns mounted on trucks.

Woods and at least two others ignored their direct orders and made their way to the consulate, which was now on fire. They did not find the Ambassador, but got into a firefight with the attackers. At midnight they evacuated to the annex those who remained at the Consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. With the CIA annex now taking fire they requested back up, but were twice turned down.

There were two military surveillance drones in the vicinity that were redirected to Benghazi to send real-time visuals back to the White House Situation Room, State Department, CIA, Pentagon and others after the attack on the Consulate began. With Sigonella Air base in Sicily just 480 miles away and continuous fighting going on at the CIA annex for more than four hours, the military could have easily deployed F-18s in 38 minutes and a Specter gunship in 90 minutes.

It has now been confirmed that two separate Tier One Special operations forces, including Delta Force, were mobilized, but told to wait. Based on our contacts, Africa Commander General Hamm launched the Delta Force rescue team on his own authority and was then told to “stand down.” When he argued, he was relieved of his command. Stars and Stripes newspaper confirmed that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced President Obama would nominate Army Gen. David Rodriguez to succeed Gen. Carter Ham as U.S. AFRICOM Commander.

It has been confirmed that a team manning a heavy machine gun on the roof of the CIA annex had a ground Laser Designator “painted” on a mortar site. Since the laser only has two hours of continuous battery life and targets are not “painted” until the weapons system/designator is synched, there must have been an AC130U Specter gunship or an armed drone overhead.

Only two authorities could have called off the weapons launch at that point; the White House situation command on the President’s direction or AFRICOM theater commander. With General Hamm relieved, it had to be the President himself. The President may have believed that Benghazi attack was another trap. Just a year before, the Taliban orchestrated ambush in the mountains of Afghanistan that killed at least 20 of the Seal Team Six unit that killed Osama bin Laden. When the Seal flew into a narrow pass to rescue surrounded U.S. Army soldiers, they were shot down by SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

Watergate demonstrated that it is not the crime, but the cover-up that is the most damaging to politicians. The White House should immediately release all the drone video tapes, documents and e-mails associated with the Benghazi attack. Real national security details can be confidentially presented to Congressional Intelligence Committees. But this information involves the deaths of Americans and is going to be leaked out over time by their friends and America’s enemies anyway. To prevent a major Constitutional crisis that will have a deep and lasting effect on our nation, the President should lead by releasing the truth immediately.

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[TonyGosling]

Behind Petraeus’s Resignation
November 10, 2012

Exclusive: The resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an extramarital affair marks a stunning reversal for the longtime media darling. But some in President Obama’s inner circle are not displeased the neocon-friendly ex-general is gone, reports Robert Parry.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/11/10/behind-petraeuss-resignation/

By Robert Parry

The messy departure of CIA Director David Petraeus over an extramarital affair removes the last high-ranking neoconservative holdover from George W. Bush’s administration and gives the reelected President Barack Obama more maneuvering room to negotiate a settlement over Iran’s nuclear program.

Petraeus’s resignation along with a public acknowledgement of an affair, reportedly with an admiring female biographer, raised eyebrows in Washington for reasons beyond the sudden and humiliating fall of the high-flying former four-star general. Normally, in such situations, a cover story is used to spare someone of Petraeus’s stature embarrassment.


David Petraeus, a two-star general during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace.

Especially in the days after a president’s reelection, it would not be uncommon for a senior official to announce new career plans or a desire to spend more time with the family. Instead, Petraeus’s resignation was accompanied by an admission of the affair. Press reports identified the woman as Paula Broadwell, who co-authored a biography of Petraeus, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.

One person familiar with the Obama administration’s thinking said President Obama was never close to Petraeus, who was viewed as a favorite of the neoconservatives and someone who had undercut a possible solution to Iran’s nuclear program in 2011 by pushing a bizarre claim that Iranian intelligence was behind an assassination plot aimed at the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

As that case initially evolved, the White House and Justice Department were skeptical that the plot traced back to the Iranian government, but Petraeus pushed the alleged connection which was then made public in a high-profile indictment. The charges further strained relations with Iran, making a possible military confrontation more likely.

Petraeus’s Input

At the time, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, a favored recipient of official CIA leaks, reported that “one big reason [top U.S. officials became convinced the plot was real] is that CIA and other intelligence agencies gathered information corroborating the informant’s juicy allegations and showing that the plot had support from the top leadership of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the covert action arm of the Iranian government.”

Ignatius added that, “it was this intelligence collected in Iran” that swung the balance. But Ignatius offered no examples of what that intelligence was. Nor did Ignatius show any skepticism regarding Petraeus’s well-known hostility toward Iran and how that might have influenced the CIA’s judgment.

As it turned out, the case was based primarily on statements from an Iranian-American car dealer Mansour Arbabsiar, who clumsily tried to hire drug dealers to murder Saudi Ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir, though Arbabsiar was actually talking to a Drug Enforcement Agency informant. Arbabsiar pled guilty last month as his lawyers argued that their client suffers from a bipolar disorder. In other words, Petraeus and his CIA escalated an international crisis largely on the word of a person diagnosed by doctors of his own defense team as having a severe psychiatric disorder.

Despite the implausibility of the assassination story and the unreliability of the key source, the Washington press corps quickly accepted the Iranian assassination plot as real. That assessment reflected the continued influence of neoconservatives in Official Washington and Petraeus’s out-sized reputation among journalists.

The neocons, who directed much of President George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy and filled the ranks of Mitt Romney’s national security team, have favored a heightened confrontation with Iran in line with the hardline position of Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the post-election period, it is a top neocon goal to derail Obama’s efforts to work out a peaceful settlement of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. The neocons favor “regime change.”

Suspect Loyalties

Petraeus’s ideological alignment with the neocons threatened to undercut the administration’s unity behind Obama’s peace initiative. Thus, according to the person familiar with the administration’s thinking, some key figures close to the President wanted Petraeus out and there was no sadness that his personal indiscretions contributed to his departure.

Regarding the facts behind Petraeus’s sudden resignation, the New York Times reported that the FBI had begun an investigation into a “potential criminal matter” several months ago that was not focused on Petraeus. It was in the course of an their inquiry into whether a computer used by Petraeus had been compromised that agents discovered evidence of the relationship as well as other security concerns. About two weeks ago, FBI agents met with Petraeus to discuss the investigation, the Times reported.

According to the Times, one congressional official who was briefed on the matter said Petraeus had been encouraged “to get out in front of the issue” and resign, and that he agreed.

Though held in high esteem by Official Washington for his role in advocating “surges” of U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007 and in Afghanistan in 2009, Petraeus actually has a less than sterling record of military success. He was in charge of a trouble-plagued effort to train a new Iraqi army after the U.S. invasion in 2003, and his supposedly successful “surge” in Iraq was more a public relations success than a change in the strategic trajectory toward ultimate U.S. failure there.

The Unsuccessful Surge

The reality regarding the Iraq “surge” in 2007 was that much of the reduction in violence in Iraq derived from policies of Petraeus’s predecessors, including the implementation of the so-called Sunni Awakening which involved paying off Sunni tribal leaders to turn against al-Qaeda extremists and the killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Sectarian violence also had led to a de facto separation of Sunnis and Shiites and thus a natural burning-out of the civil strife. All these developments occurred in 2006 before President Bush ordered the “surge” in 2007 and put Petraeus in charge.

The “surge” actually led to a spike in violence in Iraq before the other factors contributed to a gradual reduction. Nevertheless, Official Washington’s conventional wisdom was framed around the “successful surge” credited to President Bush, Gen. Petraeus and the neocons.

Though nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers died during the “surge,” its primary effect was to enable Bush and the other Iraq War architects to leave office without the legacy of a clear-cut military defeat hung around their necks. At the end of 2011, the U.S. military left Iraq with little to show for Bush’s investment of blood and treasure.

Besides Bush, the chief beneficiaries of the “successful surge” myth were Gen. Petraeus and Bush’s last Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Both remained as part of the high command after Barack Obama took office in 2009, as the young President didn’t want an abrupt break with Bush’s war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the “continuity” trapped Obama when he tried to steer the wars toward conclusions. While pursuing the drawdown of troops in Iraq, he asked for less aggressive options in the Afghan War, only to have Gates, Petraeus and other Bush holdovers maneuver him into authorizing another “surge” for Afghanistan.

Behind the President’s Back

As Bob Woodward reported in his book, Obama’s Wars, it was Bush’s old team that made sure Obama was given no option other than to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan substantially. The Bush holdovers also lobbied for the troop increase behind Obama’s back.

According to Woodward’s book, Gates, Petraeus and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, refused to even prepare an early-exit option that Obama had requested. Instead, they offered up only plans for their desired escalation of about 40,000 troops.

Woodward wrote: “For two exhausting months, [Obama] had been asking military advisers to give him a range of options for the war in Afghanistan. Instead, he felt that they were steering him toward one outcome and thwarting his search for an exit plan. He would later tell his White House aides that military leaders were ‘really cooking this thing in the direction they wanted.’”

In mid-2011, Obama finally eased Gates out of the Pentagon and replaced him with one of the President’s most trusted advisers, Leon Panetta, who had been serving as director of the CIA. At CIA, Panetta had overseen backchannel contacts between the White House and the Iranian leadership and other sensitive initiatives.

To complete the personnel shift – and to keep the Republican-leaning Petraeus out of presidential politics in 2012 – Obama put Petraeus in as CIA director. But Obama’s inner circle never trusted Petraeus who was known to have built political support for his military career by cultivating the loyalty of Washington’s top neoconservatives.

Friendly Neocons

For instance, in 2009 when Obama was deciding what to do about Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus personally arranged extraordinary access to U.S. field commanders for two of his influential neocon friends, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.

“Fears of impending disaster are hard to sustain … if you actually spend some time in Afghanistan, as we did recently at the invitation of General David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command,” they wrote upon their return.

“Using helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and bone-jarring armored vehicles, we spent eight days traveling from the snow-capped peaks of Kunar province near the border with Pakistan in the east to the wind-blown deserts of Farah province in the west near the border with Iran. Along the way we talked with countless coalition soldiers, ranging from privates to a four-star general,” they said.

Their access paid dividends for Petraeus when they penned a glowing report in the Weekly Standard about the prospects for success in Afghanistan – if only President Obama sent more troops and committed the United States to stay in the war for the long haul.

Besides getting neocons to put public pressure on the President, Petraeus turned to Boot in 2010 when Petraeus felt he had made a mistake in allowing his official congressional testimony to contain mild criticism of Israel. His written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee had included the observation that “the enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests” in the Middle East and added:

“Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. … Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”

Though the testimony might strike some readers as a no-brainer, many neocons regard any suggestion that Israeli intransigence on Palestinian peace talks contributed to the dangers faced by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as a “blood libel” against Israel.

A Happy Face

So, when Petraeus’s testimony began getting traction on the Internet, the general quickly turned to Boot and began backtracking on the testimony. “As you know, I didn’t say that,” Petraeus said, according to one e-mail to Boot timed off at 2:27 p.m., March 18, 2010. “It’s in a written submission for the record.”

In other words, Petraeus was arguing that the comments were only in his formal testimony and were not repeated by him in his oral opening statement. However, in the real world, the written testimony of a witness is treated as part of the official record at congressional hearings with no meaningful distinction from oral testimony.

In another e-mail, as Petraeus solicited Boot’s help in tamping down any controversy over the Israeli remarks, the general ended the message with a military “Roger” and a sideways happy face, made from a colon, a dash and a closed parenthesis, “.”

The e-mails were made public by James Morris, who runs a Web site called “Neocon Zionist Threat to America.” Morris said he apparently got the Petraeus-Boot exchanges by accident when he sent a March 19, 2010, e-mail congratulating Petraeus for his testimony and Petraeus responded by forwarding one of Boot’s blog posts that knocked down the story of the general’s implicit criticism of Israel.

Petraeus forwarded Boot’s blog item, entitled “A Lie: David Petraeus, Anti-Israel,” which had been posted at the Commentary magazine site at 3:11 p.m. on March 18. However, Petraeus apparently forgot to delete some of the other exchanges between him and Boot at the bottom of the e-mail.

Morris sent me the e-mails at my request after an article by Philip Weiss appeared about them at Mondoweiss, a Web site that deals with Middle East issues. When I sought comment from Petraeus and Boot regarding the e-mails, neither responded.

Obama’s decision to entrust a position as crucial as CIA director to Petraeus, an ambitious man with strong ties to the neocons, was always a risk. While Obama may have been thinking that he was keeping Petraeus out of a possible run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, the President put Petraeus in a spot where he could manipulate the intelligence that drives government policies.

Finally, as Obama heads into a second term, he appears to be clearing the decks so he can move ahead more aggressively with his own foreign policy. Robert Gates departed in mid-2011; David Petraeus has now resigned in ignominy; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who often sided with Gates and Petraeus in taking neocon-style policy positions, is expected to step down soon.

Belatedly, Obama seems to have learned a key lesson of modern Washington: surrounding yourself with ideological and political rivals may sound good but it is usually an invitation to have your policies sabotaged.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

[Disco_Destroyer]

I also hear Hilary is avoiding testifying on the Benghazi case but lots of ifs buts and maybes in this

Why Did CIA Director Petraeus Suddenly Resign … And Why Was the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Murdered?
November 11, 2012
Source: Washington's Blog

While the GOP is attacking (and Dems defending) the Obama administration in connection with the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, there is a deeper story.

Sure, it is stunning that the State Department never requested backup or that people such as Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer allege that President Obama personally watched in real time the attacks as they occurred via video feeds from drones flying over the Benghazi consulate.

But these claims only can be assessed – and the whole confusing mess only makes sense – if the deeper underlying story is first exposed.

Many Syrian Terrorists Come from Libya

The U.S. supported opposition which overthrew Libya’s Gadaffi was largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists.

According to a 2007 report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s center, the Libyan city of Benghazi was one of Al Qaeda’s main headquarters – and bases for sending Al Qaeda fighters into Iraq – prior to the overthrow of Gaddafi:

Al Qaeda is now largely in control of Libya. Indeed, Al Qaeda flags were flown over the Benghazi courthouse once Gaddafi was toppled.

(Incidentally, Gaddafi was on the verge of invading Benghazi in 2011, 4 years after the West Point report cited Benghazi as a hotbed of Al Qaeda terrorists. Gaddafi claimed – rightly it turns out – that Benghazi was an Al Qaeda stronghold and a main source of the Libyan rebellion. But NATO planes stopped him, and protected Benghazi.)

CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, and many other mainstream sources confirm that Al Qaeda terrorists from Libya have since flooded into Syria to fight the Assad regime.

Mainstream sources also confirm that the Syrian opposition is largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

The U.S. has been arming the Syrian opposition since 2006. The post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also itself a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition.

The Real Story At Benghazi

This brings us to the murder of ambassador Stevens and the sudden resignation of CIA boss David Petraeus.

The Wall Street Journal, Telegraph and other sources confirm that the US consulate in Benghazi was mainly being used for a secret CIA operation.

They say that the State Department presence in Benghazi “provided diplomatic cover” for the previously hidden CIA mission.

Reuters notes that the CIA mission involved finding and repurchasing heavy weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals.

Business Insider reports that Stevens may have been linked with Syrian terrorists:

There’s growing evidence that U.S. agents—particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels.

In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens’ life.

In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey” in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria.

Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey.” The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.

***

Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot downSyrian helicopters and fighter jets.

The ship’s captain was ”a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support,” which was presumably established by the new government.

That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria.

Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from?

Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them “Libyans” when he explained that the FSA doesn’t “want these extremist people here.”

And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens’ primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it.

Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as “a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles” … and that its security features “were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died.”

And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya.

In other words, ambassador Stevens may have been a key player in deploying Libyan terrorists and arms to fight the Syrian government.

Other sources also claim that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was mainly being used as a CIA operation to ship fighters and arms to Syria.

Many have speculated that – if normal security measures weren’t taken to protect the Benghazi consulate or to rescue ambassador Stevens – it was because the CIA was trying to keep an extremely low profile to protect its cover of being a normal State Department operation.

Why Did CIA Chief David Petraeus Suddenly Resign?

CIA boss David Petraeus suddenly resigned, admitting to an affair. This could be the real explanation, given that affairs of high-level intelligence chiefs could compromise national security.

But the timing of Petraeus’ resignation becomes more interesting once one learns that that he was scheduled to testify under oath next week before power House and Senate committees regarding the Benghazi consulate.

Many speculate that it wasn’t an affair – but the desire to avoid testifying on Benghazi – which was the real reason for Petraeus’ sudden resignation.

The Big Picture

Whatever the scope of the CIA’s operation in Benghazi – and whatever the real reason for the resignation of the CIA chief – the key is our historical and ongoing foreign policy.

For decades, the U.S. has backed terrorists for geopolitical ends.

The U.S. government has been consistently planning regime change in Syria and Libya for 20 years, and dreamed of regime change – using false flag terror – for 50 years.

Obama has simply re-packaged Bush and the Neocons’ “war on terror” as a series of humanitarian wars.

And the U.S. and its allies will do anything to topple Iran … and is systematically attempting to pull the legs out from Iran’s allies as a way to isolate and weaken that country.

Americans should ask ourselves if that’s what we want …
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Why_Did_CIA_Director_Petraeus_Suddenly_ Resign_%E2%80%A6_And_Why_Was_the_U.S._Ambassador_to_Libya_Murdered%3F/ 22519/0/38/38/Y/M.html

[Disco_Destroyer]

interesting and rather specific google search that Abdelhakim Belhadj

nice one second 1 I looked at http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/resources/reports-and-publications/27 84-who-is-abdul-hakim-belhadj-the-leader-of-the-libyan-rebels


http://digitaljournal.com/article/314858

Saif Gaddafi sends warning about Abdel Hakim Belhadj
Like this article8
Katerina
By Katerina Nikolas
Nov 22, 2011 in World
Comments
+
Grimacing slightly in pain from the wound to his hand, Saif Gaddafi was filmed speaking to his captors in Zintan. He warned them that Libyans will discover the truth about Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the military Islamist leader now in a prominent position.
From the confines of his makeshift prison cell in Zintan, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been taped in a revealing interview broadcast by the Telegraph. During the video he warns his captors of the disingenuous nature of Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the Islamic military commander of Tripoli. Indeed, if there was any chance that Saif would be freed after a trial, and should stand in future elections, Belhadj would be in his biggest rival for power.
Abdel Hakim Belhadj, former wanted terrorist and founder member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), was returned to Libya by the joint efforts of the U.S. and U.K.in 2004, and is now considering taking legal action against the British government for their part in his rendition. Following his return to Libya, Belhadj claims he was tortured in a Libyan prison, before being released in 2010.
Saif Gaddafi was instrumental in the release of Belhadj through the initiative of the Gaddafi Charity Foundation, during which he met with former LIFG members and negotiated their release, on the proviso they would disavow violence. At the time of Belhadj's release Saif said that Belhadj and other released prisoners

"were no longer a danger to society." (Middle East Monitor).

Speaking of Belhadj (and Ali al-Salabi, another Islamist) from Zintan, Saif said "I did too much good to those two guys and they pay me back with betrayal."
Saif Gaddafi asks on the video why Belhadj is speaking to the media, and says "the day the Americans handed him over to us he told us how the Americans brought him here hanging from an iron bar after torturing him." Saif then asks how Belhadj can claim he was tortured by Gaddafi regime.
Following the downfall of the Gaddafi regime, Belhadj has received plenty of media attention. He has said Libya's Islamists will not allow themselves to be excluded by secular politicians. Viewed as the head of Libya's Islamists, and with some weight of military power behind him, it is indeed interesting that in his first interview since his captor Saif Gaddafi has sought to draw attention to the danger of Belhadj to Libyans.

[scienceplease 2]

Support for "Cxck-Up" rather than Conspiracy in this puzzle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/13/petraeus-scandal-deepens-u s-general

[TonyGosling]

Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate: the new Watergate moment that may shatter Obama’s presidency

By Richard Cottrell

Contributing writer for End the Lie
http://endthelie.com/2012/11/19/petraeus-benghazi-gate-the-new-waterga te-moment-that-may-shatter-obamas-presidency/

With each passing day, the unfolding saga of Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate displays ever more surprising turns which indicate a huge cover up at the heart of the American state.

Note: don’t forget to check out Richard’s latest articles, “General betrayal: the CIA, the murder of Ambassador Stevens and the return of Iran-Contra” and “So now we know: Hurricane Sandy voted for Obama“

What happened to the calm, taciturn, seemingly sedated Obama who quietly strolled the world stage for the past four years? He’s like a champion boxer who has suddenly emerged from the corner hurling punches in all directions, like a man on something seriously hot.

Note the significant change in language instead of his customary feeble meandering words. Now hear this: ‘Anyone who has a problem with Ambassador Rice has a problem with me.’ When did Obama play with tough guy macho man words like that before?

For the record Ambassador Susan Rice is the top US diplomat at the UN. She’s in the waiting lounge for Hillary Clinton’s throne at the State Department. But Clinton is heavily compromised by Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate because of her statements after the assault that ‘security’ for the consulate was adequate. It seems to be a quite ludicrous statement given the horrific circumstances in which the unfortunate ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens and three more Americans were butchered in the dusty North African city on the anniversary of 9/11.

She is also – up to now, at any rate – the shoo-in Democratic favorite to succeed Obama. There is every sign here of an enormous dropping of the knitting in the post-election triumphal White House and a very clear indication that Obama, after a first term dedicated to a virtual Trappist denial of anything and everything controversial, has lost his temper along with his contrived charms and mannered diffidence.

Rice was the star turn on wall-to-wall Sunday US talk shows five days after the September 11th Benghazi attack. She – and not Clinton – was the chosen spinner to promote the official Administration spoof that the riot which overwhelmed the consulate was ‘spontaneous’, provoked by a crude propaganda movie usefully promoted on YouTube, defaming the Prophet Muhammad as a debauched child abuser.

If we are to believe a very improbable story, this inflammatory biopic was the brainchild of a Californian property developer with the supposedly “Jewish sounding” name of Sam Bacile, who confessed his effort was intended to ‘promote’ Israel. But Bacile – which is not his real name – is neither Jewish nor a well-heeled property developer. He is an Egyptian-born low-life with the real (perhaps) name of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a petty fraudster, gas station owner and conman whose wit and resources certainly did not extend to a fairly sophisticated two-hour hate movie on the scale of some latter-day Cecil B DeMille.

Editor’s note: the Nakoula character used many aliases including Sam Bacile, Mark Bassely Youssef, Yousseff M. Basseley, Nicola Bacily, Robert Bacily and many more.

A man hung out to dry on a string of petty fraud offenses was obviously in no position to bankroll such an ambitious project. Yet even as the steam roller of Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate gathers speed, how curious it is that the alternative media, let alone the lackey corporate hear-and-see-no-evil media fail to notice the striking similarities with the Danish Muhammad Cartoons affair that broke in the fall of 2005.

These mockeries, clearly intended to be offensive, first appeared in the Copenhagen daily Jyllands-Posten and quickly spread to hundreds more newspapers around the globe. The same cry of ‘no censorship’ appeared almost instantly in the wake of the You Tube shocker. Nakoula’s alleged effort is clearly in the same line.

Reports describe him as an FBI sneak, which is probably correct, due to his quite questionable legal history. He certainly fits the bill of a petty informer. He definitely needs a get out of jail excuse, given his many brushes with the courts, and a pack of unresolved charges, which may well have led him to confess authorship of the offending diatribe. But that understates the resources and skills necessary to assemble a political hardcore porn movie denouncing the Prophet.

That said, I cannot entirely erase the image – not a strict parallel, I admit – of the ghost of Jack Ruby hovering over the whole affair.

The political gamesmanship scarcely needs stating. The Republicans, smarting at the humbling of their champion Mitt Romney, are scorching for payback. The Administration, for its part, was scarcely helped by Hillary Clinton’s maladroit remarks concerning the ‘adequate’ security precautions in Benghazi.

This seems to be a subliminal recall of the former presidential hopeful’s famous campaign ads featuring the crisis line ringing in the middle of the night. When the metaphorical phone rang this time, Hillary clearly had the receiver off hook.

In essence this is the response of an administration caught in the open by the searchlight beams.

John McCain and his allies are of course picking on Susan Rice as a surrogate target for Clinton. But I am sure there is another side to their belligerence, which Obama’s strident outbursts do little to dispel.

The superficially appealing possibility of impeaching the President for lying to Congress raises the prospect of Obama trapped in the same Nixon retro-vice. Obama insisted that Benghazi was a ‘spontaneous’ outburst of rage, just as Nixon claimed that the Watergate burglars were on-their-own freelancers.

Watergate was resolved when Nixon elected to resign before he could be subpoenaed and fired by Congress. I think this is what the Republicans are aiming for.

In the circumstances, lackluster Joe Biden would be the perfect stand-in for the former lame duck Gerald Ford, a push-over for a tough Republican choice four years from now. In all likelihood, the shell-shocked Republican leadership has concluded it must destroy any prospect of an entrenched Democrat dynasty acquiring deep roots.

Benghazi is the weapon they are going to use. It will be aimed at Hillary Clinton perhaps more significantly than Obama, in order to wreck the smooth succession project.

The portents are ominous. Obama’s ill-tempered outburst defending Rice quickly attracted fire from the three leading senators who originally raised concerns – John McCain, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. As a shot across the bows, these three ranking senators have framed a potentially hazardous proposition to instigate a Watergate-style dedicated committee to investigate the Benghazi attack.

Obama’s response, his determination to cling to the spontaneous riot cover up is of course nothing more than a flimsy attempt to hide the Syrian Arms for Libya revival of Iran-Contra, which I have already described exclusively for End the Lie. Nakoula is yet another simple-minded patsy straight from the production line of similar counterfeit villains assigned to justify the ‘official’ version of Benghazi. The Muhammad the Monster movie has the clear stamp of a CIA-Wood production, like many more of similar ilk.

In April 2011 the nation’s leading field general, the irredeemable narcissist David Petraeus, was the president’s surprise pick to fill the shoes of former CIA director Leon Panetta, who stepped down the road to the Pentagon.

Obama boasted that he’d picked a dream ticket ‘to lead us through the difficult days ahead’, an interesting phrase which at the time did not receive the attention it merited. No sunny vision of the future then, but a clear inference of dark rather than simply difficult times lurking around the corner.

Yet this may not be the least of the storm clouds gathering over the Obama presidency. A truly Shakespearian atmosphere of conspiracy and denial has engulfed the White House within days – hours, even – of the Obama victory, reminiscent of Richard III’s ghosts visiting his dreams the night before Bosworth. That famous battle, be it remembered, followed shortly on the Last Plantagenet’s ascendancy to the throne in 1483, whereupon he was immediately challenged and wasted by his Lancastrian rivals of the Red Rose. The Lancastrians in this scenario are the nostril-flaring Republicans.

2011

- February: beginning of the Libyan uprising.

- March: the ‘Arab Spring’ protest conveyer belt delivers ‘popular rebellion’ to Syria

- Same month: fluent Arabic speaker J. Christopher Stevens named US Special Representative to the Libyan National Transition Council. He was formerly deputy chief of mission to the Gaddafi government, 2007-2009. The Libyan Arms for Syria Carousel begins here.

- September 6: Petraeus takes the wheel at the Central Intelligence Agency

2012

- On the anniversary of 9/11 the consulate is overwhelmed. Stevens is murdered. His deputy and two ex-NAVY Seals employed as contractors, die with him.

- Dr. Mohamed Jamal, a physicist who returned to the city from working in Poland, tells western reporters that Benghazi was ‘far from infected with extremists.’ Libyans were deeply upset by the infamous film insulting Islam, ‘but there was no anti-American protest last week, simply a well-planned attack on the consulate. They came with machine guns and rockets.’ [London Guardian September 21st, 2011].

The US media has largely elected to play the administration’s game. Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate is drowned out by the sex romp line of the much-decorated hero who lost control of his trousers. This story is absurd at every turn. The empire’s former military consul in Iraq, and subsequently Afghanistan, then director of the CIA, is a leading candidate for vengeance by aggrieved Islamists. Petraeus had security close to that of the president himself. So how come his literally ‘embedded’ two-timing with his fragrant biographer Paula Broadwell raised no alarms over such an extended period of time?

Even more, his tête-à-tête with the luscious Gilberte (‘Jill’) Kelley the Beirut-born social climber and all-round Queen Bee who invited half the top brass of Central Command, based near her home in Tampa, Florida, around for regular house parties. She seems to have thought of herself as some kind of Crown Princess; certainly the sight of so much khaki and brass buttons clearly made her dizzy.

But maybe there is something else here: the moisture that glazes so many American eyes the moment they are invited to adulate the military, representing the latent spirit of Frontierism that confines Americans to perpetual uncertainty and insecurity even within their own shores.

Given the security considerations, the fact that Petraeus – and the Afghan commander and NATO chief warrior designate, Marine Corps General John Allen, dragged by his former boss’s coat tails into the quagmire of Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate – were obvious targets for honey-trapping, it boggles the imagination as to why they were allowed to get away with such blatant liaison dangereuse.

Are we saying that no one in the CIA, or military intelligence, was running checks on a high testosterone general with a penchant for hanging around glamorous near-40-somethings? To make matters more compromising, both Petraeus and Allen wrote letters to court officials on army stationary to support Kelley’s identical twin sister’s battle for child custody in her messy divorce proceedings. Suspension of judgment is the phrase that flies to mind.

In such concentrated details one detects cranial matter easily led astray. The modern US army invariably marches on inbred incestuous cronyism. At any rate, George Patten must be squirming (although perhaps more likely smirking) wherever he is now. In the history of US commanders Petraeus is – physically and intellectually – a midget who owes his rise to mentors even more inferior than himself.

But his service now is to divert the attentions of Americans from the breaking and entering of a sovereign state so that armed gangs on the CIA payroll could shunt arms from the deceased Gaddafi’s armories to the stooge revolutionaries aiming at Syria, ‘the last Arab castle.’

Now that we have open season on Petraeus, the hissing serpents are out in force, slithering from the seething undergrowth of DC politics. It is perfectly true that Washington gossip market sold short on Petraeus shares some time ago, thanks to numerous inconsistencies in his military and intellectual record plus lavish praise of what is, at best, a rather commonplace set of under-achievements mostly lifted from old army manuals dating back to the Vietnam War (the desperately failed creed of counter-insurgency, for example).

Petraeus was never an American Napoleon. He was at best an adequate staff officer with a gift for self-promotion. This and the adulatory heavy breathing of the embedded press corps made him the army’s dazzling rock star, a priceless diversion at a time when America’s wars continually reveal a military colossus with clumsy feet of clay.

Thanks to his cultivated PR, Petraeus managed the illusion that he possessed the philosopher’s stone for winning wars, taking good care however not to tarry around too long as the glittering potion of success gradually shed its magic charm. First in Iraq, then Afghanistan.

If Obama did not know that the FBI had nailed Pantsdown Petraeus months ago, then either he did not read his briefings, or even if he did, then he did not understand the potential dangers. The security implications are certainly quite alarming.

Both propositions are tenable. I have longed suspected that the president dislikes the chore of plowing through written commentaries and documents, which means that the Commander-in-Chief is at the mercy of highly partisan briefings which invariably steer him towards the most belligerent option.

The president has never indicated the slightest sign of independence of mind.

It is equally possible that the FBI was waiting to pull the trigger in its own good time (a vintage J. Edgar Hoover tactic, that one) until the Naked Agent Fred Humphries went rogue and decided to blow his whistle in the office of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor.

Humphries is a former Army intelligence officer, widely regarded in the FBI as a competent and passionate investigator, yet he suddenly veered widely off script by sending ‘topless’ pictures of himself to the luscious socialite Kelley. I’ll return to that possibly important sideshow in a moment.

At any rate this is where the politics begin to appear sharply in frame. L’affaire Monica derailed Clinton’s plans to shake up Social Security. So the tawdry media uproar surrounding the shirtless spook, the frolickings in desert tents (a splendid documentary helping of M.A.S.H.), the temptress Kelley with her bizarre double act as honorary consul for Korea and some kind of Fairy Godmother for a whole clutch of top brass in an ultra-secret military base, blew Benghazi and the murder of Stevens right off the front pages and news shows to far distant horizons, just as intended.

The not so invisible hand can detected everywhere in this Watergate meets Iran-Contra imbroglio.

A shady Egyptian pretending to be a Jewish property developer uses the California desert as the stage set for a profane anti-Islamic shocker. The movie is beamed on YouTube the night before the attack on the consulate in which the ambassador and three more Americans died. The screening is blamed for enraging a mob that attacked the consulate, but every eyewitness described well-armed mercenaries who burst into the compound with heavy weapons.

Each act in the drama is attributed to coincidence. But, as The Washington Post remarked, the comings and goings of Petraeus and General John Allen to various events on the cocktail circuit were clearly known well in advance, suggesting substantial eavesdropping behind the scenes. Both generals, it seems, were being electronically profiled for future deployment.

Army seniors are not allowed to indulge in adulterous practices for perfectly obvious honey-trap reasons. Yet Petraeus dived into an association with his biographer, suggestive of a 60-year-old with a late middle age identity crisis, at best.

How strange then that he was declared squeaky clean before he went to his new job at the CIA, despite the fact that the FBI evidently knew all about his infidelities. There are at least seventeen secret intelligence operations in the US, snooping and sneaking and wire tapping. Were they all out to lunch around the clock?

The word on the grapevine suggests that Petraeus was magnificently under-qualified in his CIA role, that he had no mind for raking the muck heap of espionage. A ‘fish out of water’ seemed to chime with overall opinion of his brief reign as CIA director.

As a guardian angel of national security, he appeared incredulous. Even his relations with Broadwell seem to be fogged. Does she, as now claimed on several US radio shows, count among the various arrows in her quiver, part-time advocate for a small arms company looking for military tie-ups for its new lightweight battlefield machine gun?

Was this another topic for pillow talk on those hot desert nights? Broadwell is herself a West Point alumnus. Her tribute to her consort “All In” is rated at best as a dull hagiography. I suspect that large sums are already being entertained for the follow on, given the indications that now point to the ground-breaking scandal of the early 21st century.

We come now to flippant Fred, the Shirtlifter. Pictured naked from (presumably) the waist up, arms linked with a pair of dummies, an FBI agent with a noticeably creditable record either freaked out with the pictures he allegedly sent to Fairy Godmother Kelley, or there is another story altogether.

I suspect Humphries was assigned a lonely task without the benefit of back-up or assistance and found his masters, at best, sitting on the Petraeus investigation until orders came from higher up. That explains why he went to Cantor with such a seemingly improbable story.

The FBI has put forth no convincing explanation as to why their famous trusty apparently went haywire. Professional burn-out seems one possible answer, or there may be others, as we see in a moment.

But like so much else in the Petraeus-Benghazi affair, surface illusions will not prove the most reliable or enduring.

Humphries is not the ideally perfect companion to Lt.-Col Oliver North, the leading actor in the Iran-Contra affair, save in one respect. The voluble North did take much of the flak from the media and effectively shielded Ronald Reagan, by publicly preening and playing the all-American hero to the public gallery.

Humphries’ antics with his topless poses and peppered dummies have likewise introduced a comedy feature, a safety valve, into the otherwise deadly seriousness of Petraeus-Benghazi-Gate, which works in the same Iran-Contra manner of diverting public opinion into secure channels of waste disposal.

The big picture is not the decorated general’s problems with keeping his trousers on, at least not directly.

Petraeus resigned on the eve of giving evidence to the House committee looking into the Benghazi affair. The diversion of stolen Libyan arms supplied to the so-called popular rebels fighting the Assad regime in Syria is clearly analogous to Iran-Contra and equally illegal under international law.

The CIA has a long history in illegal arms and narcotics trading, which either Civilian-General Petraeus discovered for himself, or not, as the case may be. His evidence subsequently delivered in secret to the House committee, simply underlines the reality that he fell on his sword for very cogent reasons, at a time when the Middle Eastern powder keg is on the verge of exploding.

In his last hours, Ambassador Stevens was frantically cabling the State Department to the effect that local security in Benghazi had broken down, the consulate and the lives of its staff were now in extreme peril. His locally drawn militia guards had melted away.

The Pentagon countermanded the dispatch of Special Forces from Tripoli, who might have arrived in time to preserve the lives of those who subsequently perished in the onslaught.

At the State Department, Secretary Clinton’s crisis phone rang unheard.

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is now available from Progressive Press. You may order it using the link below (or by clicking here – Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis):

[TonyGosling]

Elite Intrigues and Military Purges: It’s Not About Sex, Stupid!
By Prof. James Petras
Global Research, November 22, 2012
http://www.globalresearch.ca/elite-intrigues-and-military-purges-its-n ot-about-sex-stupid/5312591

The headline stories claim that CIA Director General David Petraeus resigned as head of the CIA because of an adulterous relation with his young biographer and that General John Allen, Supreme Commander of US troops in Afghanistan, was under investigation and his promotion to top commander of US troops in Europe was on hold, because, we are told, of his ‘inappropriate’ comments in the exchange of e-mails with a civilian female friend. We are told that a ‘hard-charging’ local FBI agent, Frederick Humphries, Jr., had uncovered amorous e-mails sent by General Petraeus to his girlfriend-biographer in the course of investigating a complaint of ‘cyber-stalking’. Out of concern that the General’s ‘adulterous behavior’ posed a risk to US national security, Florida-based FBI Agent Humphries handed the evidence over to one of Washington, DC’s most powerful Republican, Congressman Eric Cantor, who in turn passed them on to the Director of the FBI… leading to Petraeus resignation.

In other words, we are asked to believe that a single, low-ranking, zealous FBI agent has toppled the careers of two top US Generals: one in charge of the principle global intelligence agency, the CIA, and the other in command of the US and allied combat forces in the principle theater of military engagement ­ on the basis of infidelity and flirtatious banter!

Nothing could be more far-fetched simply on prima facie evidence.

In the sphere of tight hierarchical organizations, like the military or the CIA, where the activity and behavior of subordinate functionaries is centrally directed and any investigation is subject to authorization by senior officials (most especially regarding prying into the private correspondences of the heads of the CIA and of strategic military operations), the idea that a lone agent might operate free-lance is preposterous. A ‘cowboy’ agent could not simply initiate investigation into such ‘sensitive’ targets as the head of the CIA and a General in an active combat zone without the highest level authorization or a network of political operatives with a much bigger agenda. This has much deeper political implications than uncovering a banal sexual affair between two consenting security-cleared adults despite the agent’s claim that fornication constitutes a threat to the United States .

Clearly we are in deep waters here: This involves political intrigue at the highest level and has profound national security implications, involving the directorship of the CIA and clandestine operations, intelligence reports, multi-billion dollar expenditures and US efforts to stabilize client regimes and destabilize target regimes. CIA intelligence reports identifying allies and enemies are critical to shaping global US foreign policy. Any shift at the top of the US empire’s operational command can and does have strategic importance.

The ‘outing’ of General Allen, the military commander in charge of Afghanistan, the US main zone of military operations occurs at a crucial time, with the scheduled forced withdrawal of US combat troops and when the Afghan ‘sepoys’, the soldiers and officers of the puppet Karzai regime, are showing major signs of disaffection, is clearly a political move of the highest order.

What are the political issues behind the beheading of these two generals? Who benefits and who loses?

At the global level, both Generals have been unflinching supporters of the US Empire, most especially the military-driven components of empire building. Both continue to carry out and support the serial wars launched by Presidents Bush and Obama against Afghanistan and Iraq , as well as, the numerous proxy wars against Libya , Syria , Yemen , Somalia , etc. But both Generals were known to have publicly taken positions unpopular with certain key factions of the US power elite.

CIA Director, General Petraeus has been a major supporter of the proxy wars in Libya and Syria . In those efforts he has promoted a policy of collaboration with rightwing Islamist regimes and Islamist opposition movements, including training and arming Islamist fundamentalists in order to topple targeted, mostly secular, regimes in the Middle East . In pursuit of this policy ­ Petraeus has had the backing of nearly the entire US political spectrum. However, Petraeus was well aware that this ‘grand alliance’ between the US and the rightwing Islamist regimes and movements to secure imperial hegemony, would require re-calibrating US relations with Israel . Petraeus viewed Netanyahu’s proposed war with Iran, his bloody land grabs in the Occupied Territories of Palestine and the bombing, dispossession and assassination of scores of Palestinians each month, were a liability as Washington sought support from the Islamist regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf States, Iraq and Yemen.

Petraeus implied this in public statements and behind closed doors he advocated the withdrawal of US support for Israel ’s violent settler expansion into Palestine , even urging the Obama regime to pressure Netanyahu to reach some settlement with the pliable US client Abbas leadership. Above all, Petraeus backed the violent jihadists in Libya and Syria while opposing an Israel-initiated war against Iran, which he implied, would polarize the entire Moslem world against the Washington-Tel Aviv alliance and ‘provoke the US-proxy supplied Islamist fundamentalists to turn their arms against their CIA patrons. The imperial policy, according to General Petraeus world view, was in conflict with Israel ’s strategy of fomenting hostility among Islamist regimes and movements against the US and, especially, the Jewish state’s promotion of regional conflicts in order to mask and intensify its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Central to Israeli strategy and what posed the most immediate threat to the implementation of a Petraeus’ doctrine was the influence of the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in and out of the US government.

As soon as General Petraeus’ report naming Israel as a ‘strategic liability’ became known, the ZPC sprang into action and forced Petraeus to retract his statements ­ at least publicly. But once, he became head of the CIA, Petraeus continued the policy of working with rightwing Islamist regimes and arming and providing intelligence to jihadi fundamentalists in order to topple independent secular regimes, first in Libya, then on to Syria. This policy was placed under the spotlight in Benghazi with the killing of the US ambassador to Libya and several CIA/Special Forces operatives by CIA-backed terrorists leading to a domestic political crisis, as key Republican Congress people sought to exploit the Obama administration’s diplomatic failure. They especially targeted the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, whose maladroit efforts to obscure the real source of the attacks in Benghazi , have undermined her nomination to replace Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State.

General Petraeus, faced with mounting pressure from all sides: from the ZPC over his criticism of Israel and overtures to Islamist regimes, from the Republicans over the Benghazi debacle and from the FBI, over the personal investigation into his girlfriend and hyped up media smear, gave in. He ‘fessed up’ to a ‘sexual affair’, saluted and resigned. In so doing, he ‘sacrificed’ himself in order to ‘save the CIA’ and his strategy of long-term alliance-building with ‘moderate’ Islamist regimes while forming short-term tactical alliances with the jihadists to overthrow secular Arab regimes.

The key political operative behind the high-level FBI operation against Petraeus has been House Majority leader Eric Cantor, who cynically claims that the General’s romantic epistles represent a national security threat. We are told that Congressman Cantor gravely passed the e-mails and reports he had received from the ‘Lone Ranger’ FBI agent Humphries to FBI Director Mueller ordering Mueller to act on the investigation or else face his own Congressional inquiry.

Washington-based Representative Cantor is a zealous lifetime Israel-firster and has been hostile to the Petraeus report and the General’s assessment of the Middle East . Florida-based, Agent Humphries was not just any old conscientious gum-shoe: He was a notorious Islamaphobe engaged in finding terrorists under every bed. His claim to fame (or infamy) was that he had arrested two Muslims, one of whom, he claimed, was preparing to bomb the Los Angeles airport while the other allegedly planned a separate bombing. In a judicial twist, unusual in this era of FBI sting operations, both men were acquitted of the plots for lack of evidence, although one was convicted for publishing an account of how to detonate a bomb with a child’s toy! Agent Humphries was transferred from Washington State to Tampa , Florida ­ home of the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM).

Despite their clear differences in station and location, there are ideological affinities between House Majority Whip Cantor and Agent Humphries ­ and possibly a common dislike of General Petraeus. Concerns over his Islamophobic and ideological zealotry may explain why the FBI quickly yanked Agent Humphries out from his mission of ‘obsessive’ prying into CIA Director Petraeus and General Allan’s e-mails. Undeterred by orders from his superiors in the FBI, Agent Humphries went directly to fellow zealot Congressman Cantor.

Who would have benefited from Petraeus ouster? One of the top three candidates to replace him as head of the CIA is Jane Harmon, former California Congresswomen and Zionist uber-zealot. In another twist of justice, in 2005 the Congresswoman had been captured on tape by the National Security Agency telling Israeli Embassy personnel that she would use her influence to aid two AIPAC officials who had confessed to handing classified US documents to the Israeli Mossad, if the AIPAC could round up enough Congressional votes to make her Chairwoman of the US House Committee on Intelligence, an act bordering on treason, for which she was never held to account. If she were to take his position, the ousting of CIA Director Petraeus could represent to the greatest ‘constitutional coup’ in US history: the appointment of a foreign agent to control the world’s biggest, deadliest and richest spy agency. Who would benefit from the fall of Petraeus? ­ first and foremost ­ the State of Israel.

The innuendos, smears and leaked investigation into the private e-mails of General Allen revolve around his raising questions over the US policy of prolonged military presence in Afghanistan . From his own practical experience General Allen has recognized that the puppet Afghan army is unreliable: hundreds of US and other NATO troops have been killed or wounded by their Afghan counterparts, from lowest foot soldiers to the highest Afghan security officials, ‘native’ troops and officers that the US had supposedly trained for a much ballyhooed ‘transfer of command’ in 2014. General Allen’s change of heart over the Afghan occupation was in response to the growing influence of the Taliban and other Islamist resistance supporters who had infiltrated the Afghan armed forces and now had near total control of the countryside and urban districts right up to the US and NATO bases. Allen did not believe that a ‘residual force’ of US military trainers could survive, once the bulk of US troops pulled out. In a word, he favored, after over a decade of a losing war, a policy of cutting the US ’ losses, declaring ‘victory’ and leaving to regroup on more favorable terrain.

Civilian militarists and neo-conservatives in the Executive and Congress refuse to acknowledge their shameful defeat with a full US retreat and a likely surrender to a Taliban regime. On the other hand, they cannot openly reject the painfully realistic assessment of General Allen, and they certainly cannot dismiss the experience of the supreme commander of US ground forces in Afghanistan .

When, in this charged political context, the rabidly Islamaphobic FBI agent Humphries ‘stumbled upon’ the affectionate personal correspondences between General Allen and ‘socialite’ femme fatale Jill Kelly, the Neocons and civilian militarists whipped up a smear campaign through the yellow journalists at the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal implying another ‘sex’ scandal ­ this time involving General Allen. The neo-con­ militarist-mass media clamor forced the spineless President Obama and the military high command to announce an investigation of General Allen and postpone Congressional hearings on his appointment to head the US forces in Europe . While the General quietly retains his supreme command of US forces in Afghanistan , he has become a defeated and disgraced officer and his expertise and professional views regarding the future of US operations in Afghanistan will no longer be taken seriously.

Key Unanswered Questions Surrounding Elite Intrigues and Military Purges

Given that the public version of a lone-wolf, low ranking, zealously Islamophobic and incompetent FBI agent who just happened to ‘discover’ a sex scandal leading to the discrediting or resignation of two of the US highest military and intelligence officials is absurd to any thinking American, several key political questions with profound implications for the US political system need to be addressed. These include:

1. What political officials, if any, authorized the FBI, a domestic security agency to investigate and force the resignation of the Director of the CIA?

2. Have the current police state structures, with their procedures for widespread and arbitrary spying led to our spy agencies spying on each other in order to purge each other’s top personnel? Is this like the sow devouring her own offspring?

3. What were the real priorities of the political power-brokers who protected the insubordinate FBI agent Humphries after he defied top FBI officials’ orders to stop meddling in the investigation of the CIA Director?

4. What were FBI Agent Humphries ties, if any, to the neo-con, Zionist or Islamophobic politicians and other intelligence operatives, including the Israeli Mossad?

5. Despite Obama’s effusive praise of his brilliant ‘warrior-scholar’ General Petraeus in the past, why did he immediately ‘accept’ (aka ‘force’) the CIA Director’s resignation after the revelation of something as banal in civilian life as adultery? What are the deeper political issues that led to the pre-emptive purge?

6. Why are critical political issues and policy disputes resolved under the guise of blackmail, smears and character assassination, rather than through open debates and discussions, especially on matters pertaining to the nation’s choice of strategic and tactical ‘allies’ and the conduct of overseas wars?

7. Has the purge and public humiliation of top US military officers become an acceptable form of “punishment by example”, a signal from civilian militarists that when it comes to dealing with politics toward the Middle East, the role of the military is not to question but to follow their (and Israel’s) directives?

8. How could a proven collaborator with the Israeli-Mossad and Zionist zealot like Jane Harmon emerge as a ‘leading candidate’ to replace General Petraeus, as Director of the CIA, within days of his resignation? What are the political links, past and present between Congressman Eric Cantor, (the fanatical leader of the pro-Israel power bloc in the US Congress, who handed Agent Humphries’ unauthorized files on Petraeus over to the FBI Director Muellar) and Zionist power broker Jane Harmon, a prominent candidate to replace Petraeus?

9. How will the ouster of Director Petraeus and Jane Harman’s possible appointment to head the CIA deepen Israeli influence and control of US Middle East policy and the US overtures to Islamist countries?

10. How will the humiliation of General Allen affect the US ‘withdrawal’ from the disaster in Afghanistan ?

Conclusion

The purge of top-level generals and officials from powerful US foreign policy and military posts reflects a further decay of our constitutional rights and residual democratic procedures: it is powerful proof of the inability of leadership at the highest level to resolve internecine conflicts without drawing out the ‘long knives’. The advance of the police state, where spy agencies have vastly expanded their political power over the citizens, has now evolved into the policing and purging of each other’s leadership: the FBI, CIA , Homeland Security, the NSA and the military all reach out and build alliances with the mass media, civilian executive and congressional officials as well as powerful foreign interest ‘lobbies’ to gain power and leverage in pursuit of their own visions of empire building.

The purge of General Petraeus and humiliation of General Allen is a victory for the civilian militarists who are unconditional supporters of Israel and therefore oppose any opening to ‘moderate’ Islamist regimes. They want a long-term and expanded US military presence in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The real precipitating factor for this ugly ‘fight at the top’ is the crumbling of the US empire and how to deal with its new challenges. Signs of decay are everywhere: Military immorality is rampant; the be-medaled generals sodomize their subordinates and amass wealth via pillage of the public treasury and military contracts; politicians are bought and sold by millionaire financial donors, including agents of foreign powers, and foreign interests determine critical US foreign policy.

The disrepute of the US Congress is almost universal ­ over 87% of US citizen condemn ‘the House and Senate’ as harmful to public welfare, servants of their own self-enrichment and slaves of corruption. The economic elites are repeatedly involved in massive swindles of retail investors, mortgage holders and each other. Multi-national corporations and the fabulously wealthy engage in capital flight, fattening their overseas accounts. The Executive himself (the ever-smiling President Obama) sends clandestine death squads and mercenary-terrorists to assassinate adversaries in an effort to compensate for his incapacity to defend the empire with diplomacy or traditional military ground forces or to prop-up new client-states. Cronyism is rife: there is a revolving door between Wall Street and US Treasury and Pentagon officials. Public apathy and cynicism is rife; nearly 50% of the electorate doesn’t even vote in Presidential elections and, among those who do vote, over 80% don’t expect their elected officials to honor their promises.

Aggressive civilian militarists have gained control of key posts and are increasingly free of any constitutional constraints. Meanwhile the costs of military failures and burgeoning spy, security and military budgets soar while the fiscal and trade deficit grows. Faction fights among rival imperial cliques intensify; purges, blackmail, sex scandals and immorality in high places have become the norm. Democratic discourses are hollowed out: democratic state ideology has lost credibility. No sensible American believes in it anymore.

Is there a broom large enough to clean this filthy Augean stable? Will a ‘collective Hercules’ emerge from all this intrigue and corruption with the strength of character and commitment to lead the revolutionary charge? Surely the sell-out and crude humiliation of American military officials on behalf of the ‘chicken-hawk’ civilian militarists and their foreign interests should make many an officer re-think his own career, loyalty and commitment to the Constitution.

[TonyGosling]

Posting this in Libya and Illuminati threads
Muammar Gaddafi was fighting against the illuminati and the reason why he was killed is here!

The illuminati Exposed By Muammar Gaddafi

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THlaMUq6MKU
.Scorpilingus88· 45 videos
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The truth is here! FULL LENGTH

Muammar Gaddafi was fighting against the illuminati and the reason why he was killed is here!

"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

[TonyGosling]

The Illuminati Exposed by Colonel Gadaffi - the movie?

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THlaMUq6MKU

Someone sent this video a while back and I've only just got around to watching it, not least because the title belies its seriousness and validity. Structures and organisations are tangible and visible making analysis possible (even if verifiable information is hard to come by). Delving into the mysteries of cults and secret societies is much more difficult and dangerous but more importantly, risks alienating many people who may be open to learning about fundamental flaws in our political economy but much less inclined to "believe in conspiracy theories". That said, there is undoubtedly some validity in many claims which are dismissed thus. The film contains hard evidence, much of it verifiable, about the distortions in the media which led the UK, US and France to destroy another country and eliminate a relatively successful, alternative style of government.



The illuminati Exposed By Muammar Gaddafi



One reason I was keen to watch this film is I'd read the transcript of Gaddafi's speech to the UN in 2009 which contrary to the assertions in the western media, wasn't a raving diatribe against the big Satan (the US) but a cogent analysis of the flawed power structures within the UN.



Gaddafi's Green Book is similarly dismissed but given the parlous state of our representative democracy, Gaddafi may have some ideas which could help us develop a better alternative. After all he housed and lifted all his people out of poverty, provided free health care, education and infrastructure. Women enjoyed equal rights and Libya was one of the most successful countries in the region (the other was Syria). He worked co-operatively with African nations, attempting to build a bulwark to US led imperial ambition. All that has now been swept away and replaced by chaos and expanding imperial aggression (in Mali, Niger, Algeria and spreading across the African continent).


The film contrasts Gaddafi's freedom to move among his people without the shield of G-men and bullet proof cars etc., with that needed by the US President who lives in fear of his life. Just who is the paranoid delusionist?

If you want to Comment on today's Daily Pickings go to:

http://freecriticalthinking.org/daily-pickings/457-who-was-gaddafi

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[Disco_Destroyer]

RIP

Gaddafi Interview: 'how he would want to be remembered when he dies'


Link

[TonyGosling]

Armed groups bomb Libyan military posts in Benghazi
Saturday, 18 May 2013
People demonstrate to demand the country's National Congress and transitional government ensure the police and the army carry out their jobs, and that militias are dismantled, in Benghazi May 17, 2013.
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/africa/2013/05/18/Armed-groups-bo mb-Libyan-military-posts-in-Benghazi.html Reuters, Benghazi -
Armed groups attacked military posts in Libya's second city Benghazi with bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, an army commander said on Saturday.
Nearly two years after the uprising that ended Muammar Qaddafi’s 42-year rule, the government still exerts little control over the armed brigades that helped overthrow him.
Oil-producer Libya is largely split into fiefdoms of such brigades that are competing for influence.
No one was hurt in the four overnight attacks on three Benghazi army posts, said the military commander, Hamed Belkhair. Homemade bombs were thrown in three of the attacks and a rocket-propelled grenade was fired in the fourth, he said.
The army had sent extra forces to the eastern city after acar laden with explosives blew up near a hospital there on Monday, killing three people. Attacks on police stations have become a frequent occurrence in recent weeks.
“The national army is being subjected to these attacks because they are doing a great job of cleaning the city of criminals' shelters,” said Belkhair.

[TonyGosling]

Colonel Gaddafi’s Legacy? Unregulated Libyan weapons ‘flood’ Syria
http://rt.com/news/libya-syria-weapons-rebels-117/
Published time: June 22, 2013 22:41

With a massive stockpile of loosely-supervised Gaddafi-era weapons, Libya resurfaces as a key player in the Syrian conflict, with more reports emerging that rebels get material through official and rogue channels, despite UN condemnation.

“It is just the enthusiasm of the Libyan people helping the Syrians,” explained Fawzi Bukatef, a former revolutionary commander, who has recently been appointed as ambassador to Uganda, to the New York Times.

According to the paper, Qatari C-17 cargo planes – capable of carrying a payload of more than 70 tons – have landed at least three times in Libya this year, each time to pick up a shipment of weapons that were then taken the Turkish-Syrian border, and passed onto the rebels.

Earlier this week, British-Libyan arms dealer Abdul Basit Haroun boasted to Reuters that weapons reach Syria not only by numerous charted flights, but also on ships – concealed among humanitarian aid.

The process is not controlled by the weak central government; instead, a handful of opportunistic middlemen have emerged.

"The authorities know we are sending guns to Syria," Haroun said. "Everyone knows."

Libyan assembly member Tawfiq Shehabi said the government tacitly supports the activities of dealers like Haroun, himself a brigade commander during the successful uprising against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

"After the end of the war of liberation, he became involved in supporting the Syrian revolution... sending aid and weapons to the Syrian people," said Shehabi. "He does a good job of supporting the Syrian revolution."


Kornets anti-tank missiles

Haroun and others insisted that they work according to an “above-board” scheme, whereby rebels initially approach the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the moderate wing of the rebellion against President Bashar Assad, which then asks Turkey, the gateway for the majority of weapons, to sanction a shipment.

Once shipments – which initially comprised mostly light weapons, but have more recently included Soviet-era Kornets anti-tank missiles, and Konkurs-M guided rockets – arrive in Turkey, they are then distributed among the assorted rebel units.

As the rebels do not fight under a single command, pre-agreed formulas are used to make sure that various brigades are armed proportionally to their manpower and needs, according to Safi Asafi, a coordinator commander on the border who spoke to the New York Times.

Asafi said that the weapons were not officially distributed to “blacklisted” groups, such as the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, but that this was merely a formality, with the extremist Islamists simply purchasing the weapons from the “approved” units.

A report by Time magazine at the end of last month showed that weapons trafficking is not restricted to the semi-official channels, with shadowy backers driven by ideology, religion and profit managing to set up separate deals.

The piece detailed a negotiation between a former Libyan anti-Gaddafi fighter, and a group of leading Islamic organizations fighting Assad. The Islamists said that they did not recognize the authority of the FSA, and described their commanders as “corrupt failures”.

The people involved described the talks – conducted in a hotel on the Turkish side of the Syrian border – as a routine, and everyday occurrence, as volunteers, mercenaries and arms dealers congregate in several border towns.

Restrictions on official weapons supplies to rebels by their sympathizers in the West and the Arab world have been in place for most of the past two years, and have made it almost inevitable that a haphazard weapons trade would boom around the conflict that is estimated to have taken more than 90,000 lives the UN estimates.

Nonetheless, the United Nations has severely criticized Libya for proliferating weapons at “an alarming rate”.

A report released in April said that Libya, whose substantial stockpile is largely controlled by tribal militias and even private citizens, is “enriching the arsenals of a range of non-State actors, including terrorist groups.”

It is unclear if the torrent of badly-controlled shipments will be stemmed, now that most Syrian allies have lifted their weapons supply restrictions, or if the trade will move to arm those not catered for by official channels.

[TonyGosling]

Libya in Anarchy Two Years after NATO Humanitarian Liberation
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, September 27, 2013

http://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-in-anarchy-two-years-after-nato-hum anitarian-liberation/5351737

In 2011 when Muhammar Qaddafi refused to leave quietly as ruler of Libya, the Obama Administration, hiding behind the skirts of the French, launched a ferocious bombing campaign and a “No Fly” zone over the country to aid the so-called fighters for democracy.

The US lied to Russia and China with help of the (US-friendly) Gulf Cooperation Council about the Security Council Resolution on Libya and used it to illegally justify the war. The doctrine, “responsibility to protect” was used instead, the same doctrine Obama wants to use in Syria. It’s useful top look at Libya two years after the NATO humanitarian intervention.

Chaos in oil industry

Libya’s economy is dependent on oil. Just after the war, Western media hailed the fact the oil installations were not damaged by the population bombing and oil production was near normal at 1.4 million barrels/day (bpd). Then in July the armed guards hired by the government in Tripoli suddenly revolted and seized control of the eastern oil field terminals they were supposed to protect. There is where the vast bulk of Libya’s oil is produced, near Benghazi. It goes by pipeline to tankers on the Mediterranean for export.

When the government lost control of the terminals production and export fell sharply. Then another armed tribal group seized control of two oilfields in the south blocking oil flow to terminals on the northwest coast. The tribal occupiers demanded more pay and went on strike to demand pay and an end to corruption. The end result is today, early September Libya pumped a mere 150,000 barrels of its capacity of 1.6 million bpd. Exports have fallen to 80,000 barrels per day. [1]

Armed Militias vs Muslim Brotherhood

Libya is an artificial state like much of the Middle East and Africa, carved out in the colonial era of World War I by Italy. It is ruled by tribal consensus among numerous tribes. Qaddafi was chosen in a long process of voting by tribal elders that can take up to 15 years I was told by one expert. When he was murdered and his family hunted, NATO forced rule by a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated National Transitional Council (NTC).

Now in August a new Assembly was elected dominated again by the Brotherhood as in Morsi Egypt or Tunisia. Sounds nice on paper. The reality is that, by all accounts lawless bands, armed for the first time during the war with modern weapons, including foreign Al Qaeda and other jihadists are carrying out daily bombings across the country for local control. Tripoli itself has numerous armed gangs controlling sections of the capitol. It is turning into an armed battle between local tribal millitias that are forming and the Brotherthood that controls the central government. Leaders in the provinces of Cyrenaica and Fezzan are considering breaking away from Tripoli and rebel militias mobilizing across the country. [2]

Bombings in Tripoli are daily as lawlessness spreads

Nuri Abu Sahmain, Muslim Brotherhood President of the newly elected Congress has summoned militias allied to the Brotherhood to the capital to try to prevent a coup, in a move the opposition sees very much like a coup by the Brotherhood. The main opposition party, a center-right National Forces Alliance, as a result just deserted Congress together with several smaller ethnic parties, leaving the Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction party heading a government with crumbling authority. “Congress has basically collapsed,” said one diplomat in Tripoli. [3] The Obama Administration has promoted a takeover across the Muslim world from Egypt to Tunisia to Syria by the secretive Muslim Brotherhood as part of its long-term strategy of controlling the Muslim Arc of Crisis from Afghanistan to Libya. As the Saudi-backed military coup against Brotherhood president Muhammed Morsi in Egypt in July showed, the Obama strategy has some problems.

Riots and lawlessness

With rising violence the Interior Minister Mohamed Khalifa al Sheikh resigned in August. Some 500 prisoners in Tripoli jail did a hunger strike to protest being held two years without charges. When the government ordered the Supreme Security Committee to restore order, they began shooting prisoners through the bars. In July 1200 prisoners escaped a jail after a riot in Benghazi. In short lawlessness and anarchy is spreading. [4]

Ethnic Berbers, whose militia led the assault on Tripoli in 2011, temporarily took over the parliament building in Tripoli. Because the US and NATO was adamant it wanted no “boots on the ground,” instead they freely gave arms to any and all rebels who would shoot at the Qaddafi government troops. Now they still have the guns and Libya was described to me by one French journalist who had recently been there as “the world’s largest open air arms bazaar,” where for cash anyone can buy any modern NATO weapon.

Foreigners have mostly fled Benghazi since the American ambassador was murdered in the US consulate by jihadi militiamen last September. And Libya’s military prosecutor Colonel Yussef Ali al-Asseifar, in charge of investigating assassinations of politicians, soldiers and journalists, was himself assassinated by a bomb in his car on 29 August. [5]

Prospects are grim as the lawlessness spreads. Sliman Qajam, a member of the parliamentary energy committee, told Bloomberg that “the government is running on its reserves. If the situation doesn’t improve, it won’t be able to pay salaries by the end of the year.”

The Obama Administration argues that the not-yet-proven use by the Assad government of chemical weapons in Syria justifies a bombing war by NATO and allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan, based on the “humanitarian” doctrine deceptively known as “responsibility to protect,” which argues that certain violations of human rights or safety are so serious as to transcend international law, UN Charters or US constitutional requirements and allow on moral grounds any US President to bomb any country he or she chooses. Something is not quite right here…

Endnotes

[1] Krishnadev Calamur, Libya Faces Looming Crisis As Oil Output Slows To Trickle, NPR, September 12, 2013, accessed in http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/09/12/221725022/libya-faces-lo oming-crisis-as-oil-output-slows-to-trickle

[2] Patrick Cockburn, We all thought Libya had moved on — it has, but into lawlessness and ruin, 3 September 2013, accessed in http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/special-report-we-all-t hought-libya-had-moved-on–it-has-but-into-lawlessness-and-ruin-87970 41.html

[3] Chris Stephen, Libyans fear standoff between Muslim Brotherhood and opposition forces, The Guardian, 20 August, 2013, accessed in http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/libya-rebels-muslim-broth erhood-blockade

[4] Patrick Cockburn, op. cit.

[5] Ibid.

[TonyGosling]

[TonyGosling]

[TonyGosling]

Remember NATO putting in an appearance at Gaddafi's killing?
most of the footage has disappeared but this remains

Gadaffi Death. NATO WAS THERE. PROOF--QATARI SPECIAL FORCES WERE THERE-WHY????

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeZHt1OswrI

[TonyGosling]

Divide and Ruin
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0991030311
Yet another failed state courtesy of UK & NATO
On the back of two BIG LIES of Lockerbie and Yvonne Fletcher
From the most advanced society in Africa to ruins in two years

Royal Navy ship dispatched to Libya to rescue UK nationals
HMS Enterprise diverted to Tripoli as Foreign Office urges Britons to leave after fierce fighting between rival militias
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/royal-navy-libya-rescue-u k-nationals-tripoli

[TonyGosling]

The West is silent as Libya falls into the abyss
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-west-is-silent-as-liby a-falls-into-the-abyss-9833489.html

World View: In 2011, there was jubilation at Gaddafi's demise. Not any more: the aftermath of foreign intervention is calamitous and bloody

Remember the time when Libya was being held up by the American, British, French and Qatari governments as a striking example of benign and successful foreign intervention? It is worth looking again at film of David Cameron grandstanding as liberator in Benghazi in September 2011 as he applauds the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and tells the crowd that "your city was an example to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom".

Mr Cameron has not been back to Benghazi, nor is he likely to do so as warring militias reduce Libya to primal anarchy in which nobody is safe. The majority of Libyans are demonstrably worse off today than they were under Gaddafi, notwithstanding his personality cult and authoritarian rule. The slaughter is getting worse by the month and is engulfing the entire country.

"Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your democracy," pledged Mr Cameron to the people of Benghazi. Three years later, they are words he evidently wants to forget, since there was almost no reference to Libya, the one military intervention he had previously ordered, when he spoke in the House of Commons justifying British airstrikes against Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq.

The foreign media has largely ceased to cover Libya because it rightly believes it is too dangerous for journalists to go there. Yet I remember a moment in the early summer of 2011 in the frontline south of Benghazi when there were more reporters and camera crews present than there were rebel militiamen. Cameramen used to ask fellow foreign journalists to move aside when they were filming so that this did not become too apparent. In reality, Gaddafi's overthrow was very much Nato's doing, with Libyan militiamen mopping up.

Human rights organisations have had a much better record in Libya than the media since the start of the uprising in 2011. They discovered that there was no evidence for several highly publicised atrocities supposedly carried out by Gaddafi's forces that were used to fuel popular support for the air war in the US, Britain, France and elsewhere. These included the story of the mass rape of women by Gaddafi's troops that Amnesty International exposed as being without foundation. The uniformed bodies of government soldiers were described by rebel spokesmen as being men shot because they were about to defect to the opposition. Video film showed the soldiers still alive as rebel prisoners so it must have been the rebels who had executed them and put the blame on the government.

Foreign governments and media alike have good reason to forget what they said and did in Libya in 2011, because the aftermath of the overthrow of Gaddafi has been so appalling. The extent of the calamity is made clear by two reports on the present state of the country, one by Amnesty International called "Libya: Rule of the gun – abductions, torture and other militia abuses in western Libya" and a second by Human Rights Watch, focusing on the east of the country, called "Libya: Assassinations May Be Crimes Against Humanity".

The latter is a gruesome but fascinating account of what people in Benghazi call "Black Friday," which occurred on 19 September this year, the most deadly day in a three-day assassination spree in the city, in which "the dead included two young activists, members of the security services, an outspoken cleric and five other civilians". The activists were Tawfiq Bensaud and Sami Elkawafi, two men aged 18 and 19, who had campaigned and demonstrated against militia violence. Among others who died was a prominent cleric, Seikh Nabil Sati, who was murdered, as well as a young man, Abdulrahman al-Mogherbi, who was kidnapped at the cleric's funeral and later found dead.

Their murders brought to 250 the number of victims of politically motivated killings this year in Benghazi and Derna, the major cities in eastern Libya. This is not counting the far larger number who have died in military operations between the different militias or the battles that have raged in and around Tripoli.

Without the rest of the world paying much attention, a civil war has been raging in western Libya since 13 July between the Libya Dawn coalition of militias, originally based in Misrata, and another militia group centred on Zintan. A largely separate civil war between the forces of retired General Khalifa Haftar and the Shura Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries is being fought out in the city. Government has collapsed. Amnesty says that torture has become commonplace with victims being "beaten with plastic tubes, sticks, metal bars or cables, given electric shocks, suspended in stress positions for hours, kept blindfolded and shackled for days."

It is easy enough to deride the neo-imperial posturing of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, or to describe the abyss into which Libya has fallen since 2011. The people whom that intervention propelled into power have reduced a country that had been peaceful for more than half a century to a level of violence that is beginning to approach that of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever Western intentions, the result has been a disaster. In Libya, as in Syria today, Western intervention was supposedly in support of democracy, but was conducted in alliance with the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Gulf who had no such aims.

The temptation is to say that foreign intervention invariably brings catastrophe to the country intervened in. But this is not quite true: US air strikes in defence of the Syrian Kurds at Kobani and the Iraqi Kurds in their capital Erbil are justifiable and prevent massacres by Isis. But the drawback is that foreign intervention is always in the interests of the country intervening. These may, for a time, coincide with the real interests of the country where the foreign intervention is taking place, but this seldom lasts very long.

This is the lesson of recent foreign interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Most Afghans wanted the Taliban out in 2001 but they did not want the warlords back, something the Americans found acceptable. The US would fight the Taliban, but not confront the movement's sponsors in Pakistan, thereby dooming Afghanistan to endless war. In Iraq in 2003, many Iraqis welcomed the US-led invasion because they wanted the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, but they did not want a foreign occupation. The Americans did not want the fall of Saddam to benefit Iran, so they needed to occupy the country and install their own nominees in power.

In all three cases cited above, the West intervened in somebody else's civil war and tried to dictate who won. There was a pretence that the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad were demonically evil and without any true supporters. This foreign support may give victory to one party in a civil war, as in Libya, which they could not win by relying on their own strength. In Iraq, the beleaguered Sunni could not fight a US-backed Shia government so it needed to bring in al-Qaeda. Thus the conditions were created that eventually produced Isis.


http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-west-is-silent-as-liby a-falls-into-the-abyss-9833489.html

[TonyGosling]

Just another motivation for the international bankers to take out Libya.

virtually unknown in the West: Libya's water resources
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/archive/index.php/t-284332.html

We still wonder how on earth did Gaddafi manage to stay in power for forty years? Did no one notice his madness until now?

Did no one notice that he built a HUGE FRESH WATER PIPELINE to the Benghazi region, that lunatic?

Were they waiting for him to finish?





The 1st of September marks the anniversary of the opening of the major stage of Libya's Great Man-Made River Project. This incredibly huge and successful water scheme is virtually unknown in the West, yet it rivals and even surpasses all our greatest development projects. The leader of the so-called advanced countries, the United States of America cannot bring itself to acknowledge Libya's Great Man-Made River. The West refuses to recognize that a small country, with a population no more than four million, can construct anything so large without borrowing a single cent from the international banks.

...In the 1960s during oil exploration deep in the southern Libyan desert, vast reservoirs of high quality water were discovered in the form of aquifers. ...

...In Libya there are four major underground basins, these being the Kufra basin, the Sirt basin, the Morzuk basin and the Hamada basin, the first three of which contain combined reserves of 35,000 cubic kilometres of water. These vast reserves offer almost unlimited amounts of water for the Libyan people.

The people of Libya under the guidance of their leader, Colonel Muammar Al Qadhafi, initiated a series of scientific studies on the possibility of accessing this vast ocean of fresh water. Early consideration was given to developing new agricultural projects close to the sources of the water, in the desert. However, it was realized that on the scale required to provide products for self sufficiency, a very large infrastructure organization would be required. In addition to this, a major redistribution of the population from the coastal belt would be necessary. The alternative was to 'bring the water to the people'.

In October 1983, the Great Man-made River Authority was created and invested with the responsibility of taking water from the aquifers in the south, and conveying it by the most economical and practical means for use, predominantly for irrigation, in the Libyan coastal belt.

By 1996 the Great Man-Made River Project had reached one of its final stages, the gushing forth of sweet unpolluted water to the homes and gardens of the citizens of Libya's capital Tripoli. Louis Farrakhan, who took part in the opening ceremony of this important stage of the project, described the Great Man-Made River as "another miracle in the desert." Speaking at the inauguration ceremony to an audience that included Libyans and many foreign guests, Col. Qadhafi said the project "was the biggest answer to America... who accuse us of being concerned with terrorism."

The Great Man-Made River, as the largest water transport project ever undertaken, has been described as the "eighth wonder of the world". It carries more than five million cubic metres of water per day across the desert to coastal areas, vastly increasing the amount of arable land. The total cost of the huge project is expected to exceed $25 billion (US).

Consisting of a network of pipes buried underground to eliminate evaporation, four meters in diameter, the project extends for four thousand kilometres far deep into the desert. All material is locally engineered and manufactured. Underground water is pumped from 270 wells hundreds of meters deep into reservoirs that feed the network. The cost of one cubic meter of water equals 35 cents. The cubic meter of desalinized water is $3.75. Scientists estimate the amount of water to be equivalent to the flow of 200 years of water in the Nile River.

The goal of the Libyan Arab people, embodied in the Great Man-Made River project, is to make Libya a source of agricultural abundance, capable of producing adequate food and water to supply its own needs and to share with neighboring countries. In short, the River is literally Libya's 'meal ticket' to self-sufficiency.


Self-sufficiency?!? Absolutely Not Allowed. Banksters don't like that sort of thing one bit.

This project has been in the works for many years. Have you ever heard of it? We had not until today.


Underground "Fossil Water" Running Out, National Geographic, May 2010

^^^^^^^

Libya turns on the Great Man-Made River, by Marcia Merry, Printed in the Executive Intelligence Review, September 1991

Read More!!

http://twelfthbough.blogspot.com/2011/03/virtually-unknown-in-west-lib yas-water.html

[outsider]

I've always included it in the reasons for Qaddafi's overthrow, along with his Gold Dinar currency and oil reserves.